Thursday, November 13, 2014

Understanding Anbar Pt XIV Gen Abdullah al-Jabouri

General Abdullah Mohammed Badr al-Jabouri joined the Iraqi
army in 2004. He served in the 1st Division as a battalion
commander, division operations officer, chief of staff, and then brigade
commander. He would later command the 2nd and 7th
Divisions. Most of this time he served in Anbar. In 2008 U.S. Marines interviewed
the general about how the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) had to win the trust of
local Anbaris to turn around the security situation there.

From 2004-2005 the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in Anbar was
mostly on its own. The public didn’t want to work with them at first. One
reason was that they were scared of the insurgents and what they might do to
them if they were seen with the ISF. The militants had an extensive
intimidation campaign consisting of threats and assassinations against
suspected collaborators. Another major reason was that many in the province
were supporters of the militants. Finally, the ISF were seen as puppets of the
American occupation. Tactics like raids and mass arrests along with disbanding
the military and deBaathification led many locals to oppose the U.S. On top of
all that the ISF were major targets of the insurgency, as well as being
infiltrated. For example, the first Iraqi policeman to work with the U.S. in
Fallujah was executed outside of his house with “traitor” written on him in April
2003. In July 2003 there was an attack upon an ISF training center in
Ramadi killing seven police recruits and wounding 40 others. (1) In August
2004 U.S. marines arrested the Anbar police chief on charges that he was
working with militants. Overall, the ISF in Anbar was under siege. It was
undermanned, under gunned, mistrusted and considered American stooges. It was
an uphill battle for it to win over the populace and become an effective force

General Jabouri said that the security forces had three
goals in Anbar to reverse their predicament. One was to convince the populace
that the security forces were reliable partners. Second was to convince them
that the insurgency was against Iraq. The third was to get the Americans to
change their practices and recognize the tribes. From 2003-2004 the U.S. made
many mistakes in Anbar, but by 2005 they were finally starting to learn about
how to work with Iraqis and improved their cooperation with the ISF as a
result. When the locals began to understand what the insurgency was doing in
the province, especially Al Qaeda in Iraq with its imposition of Islamic law,
killing of civilians, etc. they slowly started turning on them. This led people
to start moving towards the ISF and providing intelligence to them. This was
crucial, because General Jabouri didn’t think that the ISF and U.S. could
defeat the insurgency on their own, they needed popular support. This
eventually manifested itself in the tribal rebellion and the Awakening that
emerged out of it. The Americans facilitated the situation by pushing for the
inclusion of the tribal fighters into the police and army. In Ramadi for
example, the center of the Awakening, the U.S. was able to raise
the police force from around 150 to 1,500 by the end of 2006 by recruiting
tribesmen. That showed the huge turnaround the ISF and Americans were able to
make in a few years in Anbar. They were finally able to win over the populace,
and find local allies to assist them in fighting the insurgency. Al Qaeda in
Iraq played its own part by overplaying its hand in the province, costing it
support.

Today, the ISF are up against it once again in Anbar. Since
December 2013 it has faced one reversal after another. At the start of the year
it lost Fallujah and sections of Ramadi. Then in June it unilaterally withdrew
from the Syrian border conceding the area to the Islamic State. Recently it
lost Camp Saqlawiya, and then Hit. The army has mostly abandoned
the field leaving the police and tribes to do the heavy fighting. New forces
have been sent in from Babil, but no big offensive has materialized yet. Currently
the security forces in Anbar are facing a new set of challenges. First, they
are suffering from poor leadership. For instance, the trapped soldiers at Camp
Saqlawiya called
their commanders for supplies and ammunition, but received nothing. The then
head of the Anbar Operations Command General Rasheed Flayh called the troops at
the camp whiners.
The survivors of the siege were immediately sent
back to the front even though some of them didn’t have their weapons or
equipment. That might change as Prime Minister Haider Abadi just dismissed
General Flayh. Second, the ISF lacks a winning strategy. In Anbar the police
and army have proven capable of clearing towns and cities, but they have not
been able to hold them. Instead, the ISF regularly goes from place to place
letting insurgents infiltrate back in to locations after the ISF’s departure.
It also lacks the mobility of the insurgents who have specialized in hit and
run tactics to draw out the security forces and then encircle and destroy them.
Finally, the Anbar council and others have consistently complained that Baghdad
has not sent the ISF and tribes the weapons and supplies they require to fight.
This might be on purpose as some have speculated that the government has
largely written off Anbar, so that it can concentrate on other areas of the
country. Together, these factors have cost the government control of 80% of the
province, and the ISF are largely on the defensive. That makes the situation
far direr than General Jabouri’s period, and the outcome far harder to predict.

Iraq History Timeline

About Me

Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. I have written for the Jamestown Foundation, Tom Ricks’ Best Defense at Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and was responsible for a chapter in the book Volatile Landscape: Iraq And Its Insurgent Movements. My work has been published in Iraq via NRT, AK News, Al-Mada, Sotaliraq, All Iraq News, and Ur News all in Iraq. I was interviewed on BBC Radio 5, Radio Sputnik, CCTV and TRT World News TV, and have appeared in CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, PBS’ Frontline, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for the Study of War, Radio Free Iraq, Rudaw, and others. I have also been cited in Iraq From war To A New Authoritarianism by Toby Dodge, Imagining the Nation Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq by Harith al-Qarawee, ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassahn, The Rise of the Islamic State by Patrick Cocburn, and others. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com